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The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 25 Sep 2017 15:05:19 +0000en-UShourly1Want to see broadband’s future? Check out the airline industryhttps://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/want-to-see-broadbands-future-check-out-the-airline-industry/
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/want-to-see-broadbands-future-check-out-the-airline-industry/#commentsMon, 29 Dec 2014 18:55:21 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=903021A New Yorker explainer on why the airlines want to make you suffer has been making the social media rounds. It’s an excellent case study in how the airlines have created a miserable experience for passengers so they can build a profitable business based on charging fees for bags, early boarding and better seats. It’s also just like the playbook big broadband companies are using as they make efforts to charge both consumers and the content companies for access to their pipes.

The parallels between the airlines and the goals and arguments of the broadband industry are too similar. For example, from the New Yorker piece we have this section:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]The airlines, and some economists, argue that the rise of the fee model is good for travellers. You only pay for what you want, and you can therefore save money if you, for instance, don’t mind sitting in middle seats in the back, waiting in line to board, or bringing your own food. That’s why American Airlines calls its fees program “Your Choice” and suggests that it makes the “travel experience even more convenient, cost-effective, flexible and personalized.”[/blockquote]

Meanwhile, if we go to the arguments made by AT&T back in 2011 when it first capped its DSL broadband service at 150 GB per month, you’ll see a similar argument of people paying for what they use in this article from CNN:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Our approach is based on customers’ feedback,” said Mark Siegel, spokesman for AT&T. “They told us that the people who use the most should pay more, and they also told us we should make it easy for them to track their usage. We think our approach addresses these concerns.”
[/blockquote]

But as we have argued fairly consistently the danger is that when you start creating these sorts of incentives you also create a reason for the airline or the broadband provider to create a crappy experience so people pay to avoid it. Which is what the New Yorker points out and argues has happened in the airline industry:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]The necessity of degrading basic service provides a partial explanation for the fact that, in the past decade, the major airlines have done what they can to make flying basic economy, particularly on longer flights, an intolerable experience. … Bill McGee, a contributing editor to Consumer Reports who worked in the airline industry for many years, studied seat sizes and summarized his findings this way: “The roomiest economy seats you can book on the nation’s four largest airlines are narrower than the tightest economy seats offered in the 1990s.”
[/blockquote]

The New Yorker noted that this behavior on the part of the airlines has led to a combined $31.5 billion in income from fees and ancillary payments, which is the fastest-growing source of income for primary airlines. A source of income that the article points out has grown by 1200 percent since 2007.

It is a likewise a gift to people concerned about the Open Internet rules that the Federal Communications Commission is considering — the so-called network neutrality rules — that could lead to content providers having to pay for faster access to the end consumer.

Under such deals, a concern is that sites that don’t pay get left behind and are less able to compete against larger sites who can afford to pay up for faster access, which is the equivalent of the poor traveler who is stuck checking a bag at the gate while all the passengers who booked economy plus seats board before her toting their luggage and take up the overhead bins.

Don’t want to check that bag or sit squished in the middle with nary a bag of peanuts on that four-hour flight? Pay up and just be grateful you get anywhere at all. Don’t want to suffer through 150 GB data caps, pay up for more and hope that whatever site you want to visit does the same to make sure its bits reach you at a decent rate. And yeah, just be grateful that you get to experience the convenience of streaming as opposed to driving to the Blockbuster Video to rent a movie on disc.

So read that article and rage about the airlines, and then turn that rage into something useful by using it to stop the same thing from happening to your broadband internet. Tell your Congressman how you feel about the Comcast and TWC merger and network neutrality.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/want-to-see-broadbands-future-check-out-the-airline-industry/feed/13Accenture confirms it will use Apigee to build mobile APIs for the enterprisehttps://gigaom.com/2013/08/01/accenture-confirms-it-will-use-apigee-to-build-mobile-apis-for-the-enterprise/
Thu, 01 Aug 2013 21:36:23 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=674895When Apigee listed off the new investors for its latest $35 million round on Wednesday, one name stood out as a bit of an oddball: Accenture(s acn). I speculated that the and outsourcing firm was making a strategic investment in Apigee to get into the mobile application programming interface (API) business. That turned out to be exactly right.

Accenture announced today that it is forming an alliance with Apigee to advise its Fortune 500 clients on their app strategies and TO connect their enterprise systems to the mobile world at large.

“As our clients go digital, they are looking for ways to more rapidly deploy mobile applications and integrate cloud platforms across their enterprise systems,” Accenture Mobility senior managing partner Jin Lee said in a statement. “API-based infrastructure has emerged as an innovative and very promising solution to these challenges, and we’re pleased to expand our relationship with Apigee, who is a leader in this area.”

What form the alliance will take, I don’t know, but Accenture could easily build on the work Apigee is already doing with companies as diverse as Walgreens(s wal) and Telefonica(s tef). Apigee develops APIs that expose the complex inner workings of telecom and enterprise networks to developers in a language they can easily understand.

By tapping into a simple airline API, for instance, Delta’s(s dal) ticketing system could communicate with any travel app, allowing it to download and display your boarding pass. Or a hospital healthcare API could let fitness gadget makers upload your exercise data directly to your doctor’s files. Enterprises can also use APIs internally to easily build workforce mobile apps that can access company data.

To say the alliance expands Apigee’s reach would be quite the understatement. Accenture does consulting and outsourcing work for most of the top 100 largest companies in the world and has a reach of 120 countries. Accenture said it has worked with Apigee in the past, but the new investment and alliance would strengthen that relationship further with Accenture joining Apigee’s advisory board. This might even be the prelude to an all-out acquisition.

Correction: This post was updated at 9:45 PM PT to show that Accenture is joining Apigee’s advisory board, not the other way around.

]]>Quitting is hard to do: Why Facebook is like my cable companyhttps://gigaom.com/2013/07/25/why-facebook-is-like-my-cable-company-or-airline-for-teens-it-provides-a-utility-they-cant-get-elsewhere/
https://gigaom.com/2013/07/25/why-facebook-is-like-my-cable-company-or-airline-for-teens-it-provides-a-utility-they-cant-get-elsewhere/#commentsThu, 25 Jul 2013 13:00:02 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=671456Kids are ditching Facebook. No one uses Facebook anymore! I’m really going to quit Facebook. Any day now, I swear. It’s full of ads and it’s spammy. Only old people are on Facebook. Literally everyone has switched to Snapchat.

We have heard these refrains a million times. Every time I talk to a VC or a developer or a teenager or my middle-school cousins, they all tell me the same thing: No one is using Facebook anymore, and particularly not teenagers, who are leaving in droves for Tumblr and Snapchat.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been challenging the claim about teen flight since the company went public — not surprisingly, since we all know kids are the future, and it’s not a great sign if they’re leaving you. But on Wednesday, he spoke more strongly about it than on any previous call. And for once, his entire defense didn’t rest on the crutch of Instagram. He said Facebook itself continues to be popular with teens.

“Based on our data, that just isn’t true,” he said of the quitting claims. “We believe we have close to fully penetrated in the U.S. teen demographic for awhile.” And, “teens remain highly engaged in using Facebook.”

Zuckerberg didn’t offer much substantial data to prove that teens aren’t leaving, but even if you take his statements with a grain of salt, it’s hard to ignore the company’s massive growth in users and its gains on mobile — a platform that teens love. A billion users isn’t something to scoff at, or something that’s going away any time soon.

Personally, I’ve changed how I use Facebook a lot over the past few years. I joined when they opened the site up for non-college students in 2005. I was a sophomore in high school, and it was absolutely *the coolest* thing to be on Facebook. In fact, you could open conversations with people by asking if they were on Facebook, because it was sure to prompt a discussion.

I don’t feel that excitement or cliched “delight” that people talk about on Facebook anymore, and I don’t post personal updates there or check my recently-tagged photos anymore. But simply by joining the site at age 15 and amassing virtual friends on the platform over the past eight years, I have hit the point where Facebook is my de facto directory of contacts, and it’s hard to imagine giving that up — as frustrated as I might be with the ads or excessive noise.

Through Facebook, I can get in touch with anyone I want from high school or college, with the exception of just one or two people who are my Not-On-Facebook friends (and I remember exactly who they are). It is the first place I go to look people up, the way to message someone whose number you don’t have, and as I wrote last week, still the first place my friends and I go to stalk potential dates, even if Instagram and Twitter are just as useful stalker tools.

Facebook might not be exciting anymore, but it’s huge, and we’re still using it — an idea that Pew backed up with its most recent study of teen social-media use. The report found that Twitter use was skyrocketing, and it cited teenagers who said there was just too much drama on Facebook. And maybe if you’re 18, there is a lot of drama on social media. But the numbers? They still speak for themselves when it comes to quitting.

This isn’t to say that Facebook can rest easy — a massive user base of people who are vaguely unhappy with you is not a great position to be in. Growth at companies like Snapchat and Tumblr should concern Zuckerberg — and it would seem that it does, if he’s opening earnings calls trying to cast doubt on their threat to his company.

At this point, my relationship with Facebook is kind of like my relationship with a cable company or an airline: It’s not a pleasant experience by any means, but if there aren’t any true substitutes for what they offer, I’ll deal with the pain and keep coming back.

The FCC on Thursday proposed to auction off more airwaves for commercial ground-to-plane broadband communications. We’re not just talking about a handful of frequencies here: The FCC is eyeballing a 500 MHz block of spectrum, which could boost the connection speeds available to aircraft by a factor of 100,000.

As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained in a recent post, current in-flight broadband is so pricey and low-bandwidth because airlines rely on expensive satellite or ground-to-air transmissions systems to link aircraft to the internet. The dominant airline provider GoGo uses what is in essence a 3G CDMA network pointed at the sky. That means a single 3Mbps EV-DO connection must be spread among all of the internet users in an aircraft. Your fancy new laptop may support gigabit Wi-Fi, but the bottleneck in the ground-based backhaul link can slow you down to dial-up speeds.

The FCC’s plans, however, key in on a proposal Qualcomm made last year(s qcom) to clear a massive swathe of spectrum in the 14 GHz frequencies over which a kind of super-LTE network could be built. That network would only sport about 150 towers but each of those nodes would blast a high-powered signal into the northern horizon. Airplanes would fly between these huge crescent-shaped cells just as our cellphones move from tower to tower on the ground. But each of these aerial cells would have a whopping 300 Gbps of capacity, which would be shared among all of the planes occupying the surrounding airspace.

That’s a lot of bandwidth, but it’s conceivable that the airlines and their passengers could find a use for it. Today’s in-flight Wi-Fi is priced for the business traveler with an expense account and the inability to go four hours without email access. But these days everyone in the cabin from first-class to steerage is carrying multiple Wi-Fi-enabled devices. And they don’t just want to check email — they they want to stream video and play networked games. Airlines could also use that bandwidth to offer on-demand entertainment and live programming from the cloud, not just from their on-board hard-drives.

As for costs, a more efficient network could allow airlines to drop rates — or maybe even eliminate in-flight broadband fees entirely — to make high-bandwidth connections available to all customers. GoGo’s current network uses 160 towers, making it the same the size as Qualcomm’s proposed system. The infrastructure investment would be about the same, but by using the latest 4G network technologies and hell of a lot more spectrum, we could shove a lot more bandwidth into that infrastructure.

The 14 GHz band is currently used by fixed satellite providers as an uplink path to their birds in orbit. The FCC proposal would require that the any new in-flight network share those frequencies with its current tenants. In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission said it is seeking industry comment to ensure there will be no interference between those two uses.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/05/09/more-wi-fi-in-the-sky-fcc-proposes-to-free-up-airwaves-for-faster-in-flight-broadband/feed/1After sorting out mobile carriers’ APIs, Apigee targets healthcare and the airlineshttps://gigaom.com/2013/03/28/after-sorting-out-mobile-carriers-apis-apigee-targets-healthcare-and-the-airlines/
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:00:42 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=625177I don’t travel by air that often, but I fly enough that I’ve managed to build up quite the collection of airline apps on my phone. Every time I find myself trying to remember my Delta or United password to download my boarding pass, I can’t help wondering why someone doesn’t make a single app incorporating the mobile features of every airline. If Apigee has a say in the matter, some day someone will.

Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

While American Airlines(s aar) and Walgreens(s wag) may have the resources to churn out digital boarding passes and loyalty cards, your typical gym or local pizza chain doesn’t, explained Joe Beninato, Tello’s co-founder and until recently its CEO. “We came to the realization that it was very difficult for people who weren’t engineers to build these passes,” Beninato said.

PassTools is capable of generating the tens of thousands of individual boarding passes a day required by an airline or a monthly coupon for a pizzeria, which is why Airship found the technology so appealing, said Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke. Airship can sell passes to the current roster of big brands using its app-based push messaging services, and it can target smaller companies who otherwise have no presence in an app store or even on the mobile web. For a small local business, a loyalty card or coupon may be the only digital presence it needs, Hieggelke said.

The companies, which were brought together by their common investor True Ventures, wouldn’t reveal and financial details of the deal. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s staff of five full-time employees on board in Palo Alto (Airship is based in Portand, Ore.). Before the acquisition, Tello had raised $2.7 million in a Series A round led by Bullpen Capital and True.

Disclosure: Urban Airship and Tello are both backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2012/12/04/urban-airship-starts-filling-apples-digital-wallet-with-tello-buy/feed/2Priceline acquires Kayak for $1.8 billion five months after IPOhttps://gigaom.com/2012/11/08/priceline-acquires-kayak-at-1-8-billion-valuation/
Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:18:29 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=582439Priceline announced today that it has agree to acquire Kayak for $40 a share, valuing the online travel booking site at $1.8 billion. Priceline will pay approximately $500 million in cash and $1.3 billion in equity and assumed stock options, it announced today in a press release.

The company allows customers to compare travel prices across services, and is best known for its airline flight search, although it also does hotels and rental cars. Kayak processes more than 100 million user queries each month, it noted in the press release. The company was founded eight years ago by Paul English and CEO Steve Hafner. Priceline is one of the largest online travel sites in the world.

“A bomb just dropped in the online travel world,” wrote Rafat Ali of Skift. He noted that “Priceline will gain a great online and mobile team to build its portfolio and will put muscle behind the Kayak brand.”

]]>How to Avoid the Seven Deadly Sins of Mobile Marketinghttps://gigaom.com/2011/03/12/how-to-avoid-the-seven-deadly-mobile-marketing-sins/
Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:00:26 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?p=61649I was driving last week when I found myself behind a bus sporting one of the silliest mobile marketing efforts I’ve ever seen. On the back of the bus was a tourism plug for Tucson, Ariz., featuring an attractive woman, a rocky desert landscape and a QR code. Yes, a QR code. On the back of a city bus.

As I’ve said before, I think mobile barcodes have immense potential. But as I drove behind the bus I wondered how people would actually use that QR code, which presumably takes users to a mobile site for a Tucson tourism organization. Was I supposed to drive closely enough to the back of the bus to scan the code with one hand on my phone and the other on the wheel? Should pedestrians bolt into the street to try to capture the image at bus stops?

The ill-conceived effort reminded me that mobile marketing is still an emerging space that is largely misunderstood by those outside the mobile industry (and sometimes by those in it). So for advertisers looking to reach consumers on their mobile phones — and for the countless number of mobile marketing companies trying to help those advertisers — here are seven key pitfalls to avoid:

PC-type mobile sites: Building a good mobile site doesn’t simply mean squeezing your content down to fit a smaller screen; it means addressing the differences in websites are used across different devices. For instance, a consumer is likely to check an airline’s website on a PC to compare fares or change seat assignments. But a mobile user is more likely to check the status of a flight. So that option should be presented to mobile users immediately — not after a few clicks or buried at the bottom of the screen. And never ask a mobile user to enter more than a few words from his handset to sign up for a mailing list, say, or create an account.

One-way marketing streets: Almost every mobile marketing campaign (aside from branding efforts) should invite users to interact with the advertiser. Ask consumers to send an SMS to receive a discount offer, or to submit a photo to join a sweepstakes. Just as important, maintain a database of your mobile users. Communicate regularly with them and give them a reason to stay engaged, but never…

Over-reach: Once you’ve established a relationship with a consumer, don’t bombard her with come ons. If she has signed up to receive product announcements or sales alerts, give her those, but nothing (or not much) more. And always, always make it as easy to opt out as it is to opt in.

Bluetooth-based surprise assaults: Spam is a particularly bad idea on a mobile phone, which (as you’ve heard countless times) is the most personal device consumers carry. And an unsolicited message asking if I want to receive a message is as annoying as sending me the message in the first place. If you must market via Bluetooth — a practice I generally can’t stand — make sure you’re doing it from clearly marked locations (like a kiosk in a movie theater) that will reach a targeted population rather than everyone who happens to walk by your storefront.

Failing to leverage the phone’s functionality: Any local search campaign should include a click-to-call feature that can connect advertisers and would-be customers with a single touch. And phones are location-aware devices that also serve as cameras, music/video players and messaging devices. Find innovative ways to entice consumers to use some of those features as you interact with them.

Siloed campaigns: Mobile works best when it’s part of larger campaigns that embrace a variety of media as well as social networks. (Ubisoft last year leveraged Facebook and Twitter effectively in this mobile marketing campaign for the game Splinter Cell: Conviction.) Place QR codes in print, online and on billboards (but, um, not on buses) to establish a new line of communication with consumers. If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, use in-store displays to make sure your customers know about your mobile website. And use traditional media to encourage users to reach you via short codes.

Building only an iPhone app: Developing mobile apps isn’t always a great mobile marketing strategy, particularly for those on a shoestring budget. Only about one-third of all mobile users in the U.S. own smartphones, according to recent data from Nielsen, and only about one-fourth of those carry an iPhone. So an iPhone-only app will reach a very small segment of the market. If it’s worth building for iOS, it’s also worth building for Android — and probably BlackBerry.

Though no gaming platform has a shortage of “simulator” tycoon style games, few have enough engaging gameplay to really stand out among the crowd. Now Boarding, a tycoon style game revolving around routing passengers at an airport, is one of these little treasures and a great game to help you relax and escape from the real world.

The basic gist is that you are the owner of an airline and its home terminal, in charge of the amount and placement of seats, stores, and snacks (among other unlockable treasures). Your mission is simple. Ferry passengers from your airport to others. As your business grows, you can take on other destinations, more passengers and larger aircraft to handle the traffic.

The game is laid out as five “episodes” spanning various regions across the northern hemisphere. Individual cities within each episode have their own unique characteristics, such as Orlando being busier during the summer (due to its amusement parks). Strategy is essential as you grow your fleet of aircraft and choose which destinations to expand your airline service to next.

With unique graphics and an engaging soundtrack, gameplay is very upbeat and fun. Don’t be surprised to waste huge amounts of time as you play to unlock awards and achievements.

Inside your terminal, you are responsible for staffing appropriate positions (ticketing, gate attendant, customer service, docking) in addition to expanding your airline fleet, all while keeping within your budget. As traffic to your airline grows, you will be able to expand to offer more unique methods of transportation, including a helicopter, a 36 seat plane and a private jet.

As your airline business grows, so does the difficulty of keeping happy the hundreds of passengers that move throughout your terminal. As the pressure mounts and more passengers pile into your terminal than you can handle, they will start to get angry. When they have a melt down, the game is over.

Now Boarding started as a Flash-based game and, due to its nature, does require a pretty beefy system for decent gameplay. Users will need to have at least a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo or 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor or faster to play. On older Macs, performance may degrade as you progress higher into the game as your airline plays host to an increasing number of passengers. The game is built around the Adobe Air platform, so in addition to being compatible with Windows and Linux, it also runs just like any other standalone application, complete with its own icon.

Now Boarding is a great game that starts off simple and easy, but quickly scales in terms of difficulty and challenges. A demo version of Now Boarding is available at its website here. The full version costs $14.99. If you’ve had a chance to play, I’d love to hear your thoughts!